Saturday, May 20, 2006

Ride Your Bike to Hypocrisy Day

At noon on Thursday the 18th, a full-fledged photo-op was underway in Civic Center Plaza.

Even Frank Chiu, the legendary schizophrenic who can smell unexposed video from 5,000 feet, was in attendance.

The event was to announce a pilot program using biodiesel fuel in a few neighborhoods...

...in a few fire engines and emergency vehicles.

This was one of the most aggressively obvious television photo-ops I've ever seen.

The tiny crowd listening to the speakers could barely understand a word, because the microphone was strictly for show, and the sound went straight into the video cameras' feed.

The odd Pat Murphy of sentinel.com, a local political site, stood watching and taking notes throughout the entire affair, but he ended up just printing the Mayor's Office press release rather than writing an article pointing out the hypocrisy of the moment.

Though nobody was mentioning the subject at this tightly managed affair, the elephant in the room was Gavin Newsom's recent stabbing in the back of the Bicycle Coalition who had been working on "Healthy Saturdays" for years.

This was an attempt to close a small section of the 60-foot-wide roadway named after JFK in Golden Gate Park on Saturdays, and after Supervisor McGoldrick passed legislation in the Board of Supervisors to make a trial run at this, Newsom vetoed it principally because the major donors of the new de Young Museum had a hissy fit, and above all these are the people who he represents.

This made for a difficult photo-op earlier in the morning, which happened to be Ride Your Bike to Work Day.

It seemed that Gavin rode his bike to City Hall from home on Thursday, and then posed in front of City Hall with a large group, including various local politicians who had biked to work and members from the Bicycle Coalition.

According to a bike guru I met who was at the event, the female head of the Bicycle Colation proceeded to tell him in public how unhappy she was with the veto.

She was followed by Supervisor McGoldrick who was polite until he wandered onto the subject of "Healthy Saturdays" himself.

He was followed by Supervisor Chris Daly who just said into the microphone "Healthy Saturdays," the name of the park road closure initiative, and he left it that.

The bidiesel fuel photo-op was marred only by the gentleman above who twice walked by the small, assembled crowd and in a rich, resonant voice yelled "Politicians Lie...And Then People Die! Politicians Lie...And Then People Die!"

A large bodyguard chased him off so that other politicians could mouth platitudes for the video cameras.

Gavin Newsom has been groomed for some time to be the charismatic new figurehead for the rich gangsters who run the Democratic Party. If you don't believe me, click here to get to a Huffington Post essay proposing Gavin for President with Gore as Vice-President, I kid you not.

All praise to those environmentalists who have been working for years to make municipal fuel cleaner and less polluting...

...but Gavin's crowing and taking of credit for any of this was frankly disgusting.

I saw McGoldrick, the kid, and Gavin on public access--stationary head-on camera and terrible sound. I think it was a dynamic mic. Jake was inaudible, would that the kid were,too, and Gavin talked clearly about himself.

The camera didn't show the fire truck and Muni vehicles. But, standing behind the speaker were three Fire Department brass, including the chief, laughing and clapping flawlessly on cue. All three white. I guess the federal judge overseeing SFFD's racial discrimination just gave up.

Your coverage helps us tally the tax dollars wasted on this worthless exercise.

Fourth pic from the bottom--is that index finger ready for a national ticket?